Against the background of the leaking of the USA's secret Iraq war crimes files by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, Daniel Patrick Welch peers beneath the West's self-proclaimed cultural and moral superiority in the face of atrocities against innocent people all over the world.

"When we peel away all the layers of burning flesh, all the carefully constructed fiction of human progress and benefits of science and technology, we must face a reality perhaps even more grim. There simply is no 'us versus them'. The side claiming to represent progress has done more and done worse, using as low-tech and brutal methods as any on either side of the technological and cultural divide."